The Neka are a reclusive gnome subrace of the dangerous Nekanzi Jungle. Their dark skin and pointed teeth set them apart from other gnomes, and so does their command of fire, which they hold as both a practical craft and a sacred one. They keep no books. Everything they know passes by mouth, the account of where they came from most of all, and they tell it as a warning.
While they keep to their traditional ways and can be territorial about their jungle homes, the Neka are neither primitive nor savage - they simply have different priorities than urban gnomes, valuing survival skills and jungle wisdom over written scholarship.
The making
The Neka began with a gnome who tried to finish what cannot be finished. Tyboryx, an inscriber of the founding Nekanzi line, held that the command every gnome carries could be closed if it were fed enough life at once and spoken through to its end. He was wrong the way the first inscriber was wrong, and it killed him the same way. A half-spoken ending does not close a command. It bends it. The fire-syllables Tyboryx managed drove the open command down into the blood and left it burning where before it had only reached, and his whole line was remade in the failure. Their skin darkened to the color of the wet jungle floor, their teeth came in to points, and the heat he meant to seal them with never went cold. Neka fire-mastery is the shape his failed ending left in them, that unsealed heat still burning in the blood. No Neka takes it up as a craft; every Neka is born already carrying it. They keep his name in the spoken record and nowhere else, and they tell it plainly: the command is not to be finished, only lived beside.
Aspects
- Survivor of the jungle depths
- Fire speaker